Pasadena, Calif. – The “Cheers” version of Ted Danson – the one from 24 years ago – no longer exists.
He’s 58 now. His hair is awash in gray. And he admits that he doesn’t exercise all that much anymore because nagging joint pain makes it a challenge simply to go “from here to there.” Considering how television has been such a youth-
obsessed medium of late, you might think Danson, by now, would be relegated to cameo appearances.
Instead, when broadcasting’s new season launches this September, Danson will be the marquee name in the ABC sitcom “Help Me Help You,” playing a group therapist struggling through a midlife crisis.
And Danson won’t be the only veteran actor making the scene in prime time this fall. At age 59, James Woods will be starring in his first weekly series, playing a cocky, high-powered attorney in CBS’s “Shark.” Over on Fox, former “Alias” star Victor Garber, 57, will be the leading man in another legal drama called “Justice.” Then we have those golden oldies John Lithgow, 60, and Jeffrey Tambor, 62, who will star in NBC’s “Twenty Good Years,” a sitcom about longtime pals who are determined to charge down the home stretch of their lives in a blaze of glory.
So what’s happening here? Are the networks ready to adopt “Old guys rule” as their season motto? Well, not quite, but it is encouraging to see at least a handful of veteran performers being afforded the opportunity to shine.
“I’ve got no false humility,” Danson said during an appearance at television’s summer press tour, which ended in Southern California last week. “To be able to still go to work every day and do something funny is an amazing privilege.”
Lithgow, who headed NBC’s “3rd Rock from the Sun,” insists he doesn’t think of himself as an old guy, anyway.
“I’m 60 and I feel like about 34,” he said. “That’s my strange self-delusion.”
There was a time when plenty of TV productions were tethered to older characters – shows such as “Golden Girls,” “Murder She Wrote” and “Matlock.” But during the 1990s, the remarkable success of “Friends” ushered in a wave of shows about young, single twentysomethings hanging out in coffee shops and really cool apartments. Advertisers also began to pay a premium to reach young demographics, reasoning that was where the disposable cash was. And programmers, eager to appease the advertisers, became intent on stocking their shows with fresh faces.
But Eric Gold, one of the executive producers behind “Twenty Good Years,” said his team was determined to zig while others zagged.
“A lot of the situations and the material and the jokes (of the younger sitcoms) had been beaten into the ground,” he said. “So there wasn’t a lot of fresh areas to mine with everyone being twentysomething. We wanted to do a show that reflected society a little bit more and had characters who felt more real.”
